life must to exist consume
by Ravenspear
Summary: When he was possessed by Michael, the angel ripped out everything that made Adam anything. And now that he's back, he needs something to fill the void. -Warnings for violence, murder, cannibalism, and gore.-


**Title: **life must to exist consume****  
><strong>**Characters:** **Adam, Sam, Dean  
><strong>Warnings:<strong> Violence, murder, cannibalism, gore.  
><strong>Summary:<strong> When he was possessed by Michael, the angel ripped out everything that made Adam _anything_. And now that he's back, he needs something to fill the void.

* * *

><p>Then, he is gone. He has many miles to put between himself and the Winchesters, and the light in him is ever-hungry.<p>

The thing is, he realizes, that he was _never_meant for this, for the vastness of this vicious, alien creature that tears its way into him.

He is not meant to be Michael's vessel, is too small, and the angel is forced to make room for itself as it crawls inside and curls up like a nest of burning snakes beneath his skin

Michael hollows him out, until there is only the barest flimsy film of body and soul left to contain it, and Adam can't even scream as everything that makes him _anything_ is ripped straight out of him.

o~~~o

He supposes that maybe all of that would have been alright - that all that pain and vicious, tearing loss would have been awful, but acceptable - if that had been the end of it.

It's not.

o~~~o

Adam crawls out of the ground, cold and empty, save for a white, sharp-edged light where his heart should be. It feels like Michael, and it _hurts_.

He considers crying, staying curled up in the wet grass, but the painful light in his chest makes him grind his teeth and get up, makes him move.

It doesn't take long for him to reach a house, and he watches through windows as a family goes about their evening.

He watches the children - two sons, one daughter - play video games, while their parents solve crossword puzzles in the kitchen.

He watches as the wife gets up to send the children to bed, the children disappointed and pleading, but resigned to their fates.

He watches the husband and wife curl up on the couch, watching a movie they don't care about as an excuse just be near each other, like they're just teenagers again.

He watches the husband kiss his wife, before leaving for upstairs, flicking the lights off as he goes.

He watches himself reflected in suddenly dark glass; hair and skin and eyes all bleached white and faded. A trick of the light, he thinks, but as he looks down at his hands, they are pale, nearly translucent, and the light in his chest sparks with pain and purpose.

What happens next is all new, horrifying instinct; walking ghostlike through the house, so silent it's like sound has been drained from him as well as color; the wife's neck blissfully warm under his hands, an aborted scream vibrating against his fingers; blood scalding hot against his skin as he plunges a hand through her belly and up, towards lungs and heart; the metallic taste of blood and flesh in his mouth, the light in his chest singing as it feeds.

When it's done, when _he's_done, when he sees the wrecked carcass on the floor, bathed in the dim light of the television screen, he is overwhelmed by the brutality of it, the obscenity. He knows he was the one to do it, but he wonders how he ever could.

He runs.

He runs out of the house, across field and forest, and he runs runs runs until he falls. Not for shortness of breath, or exhaustion, because he feels neither (and thinks he might actually be _unable_to) but simply because he trips.

He stays on the ground, can't get up for the shock, and the light pulses, sated and pleased.

o~~~o

The next morning, he washes the blood off in a stream, and in the reflection he can see that his eyes are blue, his hair is blonde, and his skin is pale, but still decidedly pink.

The light in his chest flares a little, and Adam understands what it means.

_'Consume, or we will fade.'_

And the light seems pretty intent on not _ever_ fading.

o~~~o

He steals new clothes from a clothesline; the jeans are a bit too large, the t-shirt a bit too tight, but they're not covered in blood that refuses to come out, so it's a definite upgrade.

He keeps his boots, and pretends they've always been a rusty brown.

o~~~o

He tells himself he's not going to feed again, that he's going to starve the hungry thing in his chest until they both die.

He tells himself that he's already suffered the worst pain he'll ever feel, and nothing this little castoff part of angel can do will ever compare.

He tells himself that other people's lives are not less worth than his continued existence.

He tells himself he's still human.

(It's all a nice illusion, at least.)

o~~~o

The pain drives him to kill again a few days later.

All the color has already drained out of him, he makes no sound as he moves and his voice is becoming faint and whispery, and he can feel himself loose substance, becoming light and immaterial, like the wind could just pick him up and carry him away (he stays inside or hides in lee on windy days, because he doesn't want to test the theory).

He hitches a ride with a group of three college girls, heading home for summer holidays, and he sits in the backseat with Linda, while Nia and Leslie watch them with smiling eyes in the rearview mirror.

He feeds them lies about himself while he tries to tear his eyes away from exposed necks and arms and Linda's thighs that are left so tantalizingly bare by how her already short skirt rides up.

The light flares with stabbing pain, and he can't help but fold over with it, arms crossed tightly over his chest, knees instinctively coming up to protect his torso from attack.

"Oh God!" Linda exclaims, and she leans over, putting her warm, warm hands against him. "Adam, are you alright? What's wrong?"

Those are Linda's last words in life, and her blood warms him from the inside as he swallows it down with chunks of liver.

Nia screams, dark eyes wide in the rearview, and in her terror she loses control of the car. She stops screaming as they skid of the road and her head slams hard against the steering wheel, then the driver's-side window.

Leslie, responsible Leslie, struggles with her seatbelt, screaming, and when she finally gets it off her, she opens the door and bolts.

Adam doesn't care. All he cares about is how warm he feels, how alive and solid and painless.

Besides, they're in the middle of nowhere, and Leslie won't find help for a long time yet.

He has all the time in the world for the two warm bodies before him.

o~~~o

He drives Nia's car until it's out of gas, then parks it in a out of the way forest clearing.

He buries Nia and Linda there, digs the graves with a crowbar, fills them back up with his hands, and gathers stones to build small cairns on top.

He treats their dead bodies with as much respect as he can, because he knows they deserve it, and because there's a sort of faraway sense of regret in his mind, vague and indistinct.

o~~~o

See, the thing is there is this... _disconnect_in his mind. Its name is Michael, and it doesn't see humans as sentient beings worthy of consideration as anything other than means to an end.

Currently, that end is the survival of whatever is left of the boy that was once Adam Milligan.

But Adam can still reason, even if the light in his chest cannot.

So if killing is inevitable, then Adam can at least _choose_who has to die.

And it's not as if there isn't a substantial pool of possible victims that would serve the world better in the ground.

o~~~o

The first kill that isn't just on instinct is a guy who tries to rape a girl in an alley outside a nightclub. The girl screams and screams and screams in the man's arms , and just keeps on screaming when Adam rips him from her, then bashes his head against the brick wall again and again until his skull is cracked and Adam can reach into it and scoop out the brains and lick them from his fingers.

The girl can't get her legs under her to run away until Adam turns towards her and _tells_ her to.

o~~~o

The first kill he actually _plans_is a guy who beats his kids. Adam notices them at the grocery store while stocking up on soap and washing detergent; two girls with downcast eyes and long-sleeved shirts that out of place in summer, and occasionally slide up to reveal dark bruises on arms and stomachs. He notices the father seconds later, smiling and doting, but with ugly darkness in his eyes.

Adam follows them home on a bike he steals, and lurks about their backyard.

He means to stay out there, hiding until the girls go to sleep and he can take care of the father without having to worry about them.

He means to, but finds that he can't. Because as he watches through a window, the father slaps one of the girls hard enough to send her flailing to the floor.

So Adam acts. Bursts through the kitchen door, strides into the living room, and hits the man so hard he's sent flying into the wall.

He helps the girl, the older of the two, off the floor, and sinks down to kneel in front of her. "Are you alright?"

She nods, eyes wide and shocked and terrified, but Adam can't care about that right now.

"Okay, that's good," he says. "Now, you have to grab your sister, and run your neighbor and ask for help, okay? Tell them there's a bad man in your house, and that they have to call the police. Can you do that?"

Her eyes flicker to her father, slumped against the wall, then she nods again.

"Okay. Now go."

And she does, running over to pull her little sister from her hiding place behind the couch, then ushering her out of the house.

Adam follows them all the way out, and watches them run down the street. Then he turns and walks back into the living room, back to his next meal.

"Wake up, asshole," he says loudly, slapping the man until his eyes flutter open. "I want you to be awake for this."

o~~~o

The first kill he actually _stalks_is one of the best ones.

She seduces men, lets them take her back to their hotel rooms, then fucks them until she finally digs her thumbs - adorned with long, metallic fake claws - into their eyes and all the way through to their brains.

She is a serial killer, making blood sacrifice to a goddess that never existed outside of her own mind, and she is a beautiful, terrible thing.

As he hunts her, he thinks he's falling a little bit in love.

He is waiting for her in her apartment when she comes back from work (unassuming bank clerk; it's always the quiet ones), and he kills her slowly as she prays in reverent whispers against his cheek, calls him an angel sent to her from her beloved goddess.

Afterwards, he is careful to mar her body as little as possible when he pulls out her organs and eats them.

o~~~o

Inevitably, people come looking for him.

He manages to evade the police, but three hunters catch up with him in California, and they are _much_better at profiling monsters.

They lay an ambush for him at one of his usual hunting grounds, and he walks right into it.

He won't make such a mistake again.

And neither will they.

o~~~o

Of course, where there are hunters, there will be more hunters.

And where other hunters have _died_, there will quite likely be Winchesters.

o~~~o

Sam and Dean find him in a small Texas town not very far at all from the Mexican border, in the middle of a feed.

The bastard he's devouring is an escapee by the name of Jeremy Randall; a child-molester and murderer that Adam has been on the trail of ever since news of his escape from the Houston courthouse holding cells hit the radio and television broadcasts.

The Winchesters fling open the back doors of the van he'd found Randall in, and Adam looks up from the piece of lung he'd been tearing bite-sized pieces from.

"Adam?" Sam breathes, horror and guilt warring on his face, while Dean just stares like he doesn't want to believe what he sees.

Adam can understand them; he doesn't really want to see them in this particular context either.

"Don't shoot me," he says, raising his hands, still covered in gore. "You think we can talk about this?"

Apparently not, as Dean's response is a faceful of buckshot.

Also apparent is that buckshot does absolutely jack shit on him when he's well-fed.

He takes the opportunity the Winchesters' shock gives him to close the distance to the brothers faster than is probably strictly humanly possible, planting a palm in Dean's chest that pushes him back and yards away, then backhanding Sam to the ground when he buries a knife in his throat.

He pulls out the knife slowly, watching Sam watch him. "That wasn't very familial," he points out as the knife comes loose , reaches a hand up to feel the wound. His fingers come away bloodless, and he smiles a bit. Just another thing that makes him less than human. "Last time I saw you guys, you were all big on that, if I remember it right."

"Adam..." Sam chokes out, eyes wide, shaking his head in denial. "What happened to you?"

And how to even explain what Michael did to him, turned him into? He doesn't think the words for it even exist yet.

"Michael broke me," he says simply. "He broke me, and didn't have the decency of killing me once he was done. And now I have to feed."

He drops the knife, lets it fall to the ground, burying itself to the hilt in the dirt. "If I don't feed, I disappear. It's slow, and it's feels like being back _there_again. And I can't do that, Sam. I've tried, and I can't do it anymore," he says softly. "And it's not as if I'm killing anyone who doesn't deserve it. Murderers, rapists, child abusers. Monsters just as bad as the ones you kill," he adds, and doesn't bother with not trying to sound accusing, because that has to be the greatest hypocrisy he's ever encountered, that humans are considered better than any supernatural creature out there, simply by virtue of being human, no matter how vile they may be.

"Adam, there has to be another way to-"

"There isn't!" he cuts Sam off sharply. "Animals don't work, corpses are never fresh enough, and the few times I've been able to down one of _your_ monsters, I've ended up puking up black fucking _sludge_." He sighs, draws a hand through his hair, and tries to calm down. "Just... Leave me alone, Sam? Just let me be."

And Sam looks so sorry for him, so guilty, and his eyes flicker over to Dean, passed out but breathing steadily and not bleeding. "Okay," he says when his eyes come back to Adam's face. "Okay. I'll tell him you knocked me out," he adds as he gets up. "Just... cover your tracks better, move from place to place more often, and... Don't get yourself_killed_, Adam." The last words are spoken in a pained rasp, and there are tears in Sam's eyes when he reaches into a pocket and pulls out a business card, scribbles a number on the back before offering it to Adam. "And... If you ever need... Just call, okay?"

Adam isn't sure what is going on in Sam's head, is probably too inhuman to understand, but he realizes that it's big, that it's important. "Yeah," he says, takes the card and slides it into a pocket. "I'll call."

He feels like maybe he should hug Sam, offer some sort of comfort for whatever it is that tears at him, but he can't imagine himself doing it, can't imagine such closeness anymore without equating it to feeding. Instead, he grips Sam's arm tight in one of his hands, tries to make it say whatever it is Sam needs to hear. "Thank you, Sam."

Then, he is gone. He has many miles to put between himself and the Winchesters, and the light in him is ever-hungry.


End file.
